Love/Imperfect

Wonderful Town

Wonderful Town for Jean Oliver, and for my mother Judy was a little jealous of Jean, she had to admit. She, after all, was the one who had always wanted to go to New York. Chicago was fun, of course. She’d been going there with her mother since she was a girl, and she and Jean had gone a couple times the summer after high school. She had applied for jobs in the city a few weeks before and was hoping the one at that insurance company would come through. Still though, Jean made New York sound endlessly more glamorous. Jean’s joining the WAVES wasn’t that much of a surprise. Everybody wanted to do something for the war effort, but beyond that, the WAVES were likely to get her farther away than any other option, which was what Jean was most interested in. If things at home, for Judy, had been a little spare—given the Depression and all—for Jean they were not just spare but ugly. They never talked much about it, but Judy knew. 82 · christopher t. leland Jean’s first letters trilled with the sheer excitement of Manhattan. If Chicago teemed with soldiers and sailors, Judy could only imagine what New York was like. In Chicago, they were training up at Great Lakes or Glen View or one of the countless other bases scattered around the city, but in New York, they were all converging to make the trip across the Atlantic, off to England or North Africa or on to Italy. “There are cute boys everywhere!” Jean gushed. “FROM everywhere !” She’d had dates with fellows from Florida and Maine and New Mexico and Oregon; San Luis Obispo and Nashville and Helena and Charleston, West Virginia. An ensign from Savannah had taken her to dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, and a major from Wyoming got them tickets for Oklahoma! Jean said it was the most wonderful play she’d ever seen. Stuck in Galesburg, Judy could only imagine. The touring company would come to Chicago, of course, but that wasn’t the same as seeing it on Broadway. Jean’d done all the tourist things—the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building (“You really can see three states, and if it’s really clear you can see four!”), St. Pat’s, and Rockefeller Center. She’d been out to Coney Island endless times on the subway and even had gone way uptown to see Grant’s Tomb (he was from Illinois, after all) and St. John the Divine (“They’re not even a quarter done with it!”). The Bronx Zoo. Madison Square Garden. Christopher Street. She’d been to the Broadway Canteen so many times, she couldn’t count. Of course, there was also work—typing and filing and running messages all over town as ship after ship was loaded up with men and then headed east. wonderful town · 83° ° ° From the first, Jean told Judy to have the boys from town who’d been called up and were headed that way to look her up. She was always game to show them around, though she admitted, by her twelfth trip up the Empire State, she getting a bit jaded. “I was exhausted when Lenny and Fred came in, but I did my best to be perky,” she wrote. “I told them that was Pennsylvania way off west even though I think it was too hazy to see that far. Probably just more Jersey! But they were both so cute in their sailor suits! I can remember when they were just kids. . . .” After the first six months or so, the letters were fewer. Judy had gotten the insurance job in Chicago and had moved there. Still, she went home pretty much every month, so she got news of Jean from their mothers, though even they said she wasn’t nearly as communicative as she’d been when she first got there. “Well,” Judy said in Jean’s defense, “she’s made friends. She’s not homesick anymore.” She always had been a practical person. “I’m sure things are getting busier than ever.” Everybody knew the invasion of Fortress Europe was coming. “Besides, the novelty’s worn off now.” Living in a big city, she thought herself more worldly than she had been before, more aware of just how vast everything was—especially this war that now sprawled across...